Beast in the Jungle by Research Paper

Total Length: 976 words ( 3 double-spaced pages)

Total Sources: 5

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Even in Sedgwick's iconoclastic, homoerotic reading, however, it is possible to argue that the moral of The Beast in the Jungle is the same: living in fear of disaster leads to a life without love, whether life is spent separating one's self from others because of fear of losing them, or fear of social censure. The story takes the form of a psychological narrative more than a conventional marriage plot: since it is about a man opting out of conventional social norms, rather than engaging in them. It features Marcher deciding to ignore May's obliquely expressed interest, a few dinners enjoyed by the two of them, and then her eventual demise. Marcher's "imaginative concrete image" of the beast, a metaphor made real, is the most dramatic aspect of the novel (Gottschalk 43).

While it is possible to use the still-unknown reasons for James' unmarried existence to interpret The Beast in the Jungle, regardless of what personal elements were used to create the tale, without the tools of modernist story-telling, the drama conveyed by the story would be impossible.
The story is a psychological tragedy that details the horrors of an unlived life, and a man who is unable to make meaningful connections with others, only obsess about himself. Through the use of the metaphor of the deadly beast that is far more of a killer in the mind than in live, James creates the ultimate psychological 'horror' story of romantic love, where the spirit of the protagonist is destroyed not through longing, but his own egoism. Ultimately, Marcher is far more lifeless than May, even though it is she who dies, not he.

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